Re: [Semediawiki-user] Proposed new version of Special:Ask

[Yaron K. <ya...@gm...>]

Hi,
Phillipp - yes, I don't think there's anything wrong with integrating
aspects of Halo directly into SMW. And if each format now publishes a list
of its parameters, plus a translatable description of each one, I would
think that could be helpful for the Query Interface tool.

Bernhard - these are all good suggestions; they're somewhat unrelated to the
changes I'm proposing, of course, but then again, this is probably as good a
time as any to do this kind of overhaul. My specific comments are inline:


On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 4:10 AM, Krabina Bernhard <kr...@kd...> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I think it's not reinventing the wheel since not everyone is using the halo
> extension.
>
> So I think the improved version should be part of SMW! Some improvements I
> would like to see:
>
> - data input without brackets. Category:Items should be enough. I'm happy
> if the user realises what is a category and what not. Don't let them input
> the brackets (I think you could even allow both ways).
>

Making brackets optional is a good idea - question marks are already
optional in the list of printouts/properties on the right.


> - the link for "Querying help" should point to a page Help:Querying inside
> the wiki. From there, everyone is free to link to the SMW help pages. But it
> might be useful to have a customized help pages (with data examples from the
> wiki and maybe in languages not covered on semantic-mediawiki.org)
>

Linking to an internal page, "Help:Querying", sounds like a good idea in
some cases; although my hunch is that this will result in a missing link for
the majority of wikis. Maybe the solution, instead, is to make where that
link points to configurable in some way, so admins can change it to a local
page if they want.



> - "Additional printouts" is this intuitive? I think printout is somewhat
> expert language. How about "Additional data to be displayed" or something
> like that.
>

It's true that "printouts" isn't very clear, and it's language that isn't
used anywhere else in the wiki. How about "Additional properties to
display"?



> - change "Semantic Search" to "Special:Ask"  or just "Ask" or "Ask the
> wiki". First, the page name is [[Special:Ask]] and not [[Semantic Search]]
> and second, Semantic Search might sound a little too complex. In a SMW
> (expecially if you use SF) users do not have to be aware what semantics are
> at all....
>

Yes, "Semantic search" is a bit dry and academic-sounding; and it doesn't
really reflect what Special:Ask is about any more (it's rare to have a
search function that lets you set the format of its results). "Ask" or "Ask
the wiki" have the virtue of having the name you might expect; and "Ask"
even has a certain poetry to it. However, to new users these might seem
cryptic by themselves in the sidebar; and they might give the impression of
some kind of artificial-intelligence interface that takes in a
natural-language question (there's actually a still-unreleased SMW extension
called "Ask The Wiki" that does just that [1]). So - how about something
like "Query Creator" or "Create a Query"? That one has the advantage of
hinting that it's a tool for creating a query that can be referred to later;
either as wiki-text or as a URL; which I think is the usage that most people
will have for this page.

Of course, for all of these, but especially the last two, I'm eager to hear
Markus and Denny's opinion, since their approval would be required. Anyone
else's opinion is quite welcome too, though.

[1] http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Special:ATWSpecialSearch

-Yaron



> regards,
> Bernhard
>
> ----- "Philipp Zaltenbach" <zal...@on...> schrieb:
>
> > Nice work.
> >
> > Though, to be honest it looks a little bit like re-inventing the
> > wheel,
> > since these are enhancements which were covered earlier by the Halo
> > QueryInterface:
> >
> > http://smwdemo.ontoprise.com/index.php/Special:QueryInterface
> >
> > Regards,
> > Philipp
> >
> > Yaron Koren schrieb:
> > > Hi everyone,
> > >
> > > I've been putting some work into improving the Special:Ask page
> > > (otherwise known as "Semantic search"), to make it more usable,
> > along
> > > the lines of a discussion we had on the mailing list about it around
> >
> > > six months ago, plus a more recent discussion that Markus, Denny and
> > I
> > > had at Wikimania. You can see the result of this effort here:
> > >
> > > http://discoursedb.org/wiki/Special:Ask
> > >
> > > The big change is that now selecting any format adds in a set of
> > > fields (in the "Other options" section) specific to that format. The
> >
> > > goal of this change is to make Special:Ask more of an integral part
> > of
> > > the query-creation and data-browsing process; and by extension, to
> > > make SMW more of a self-explanatory application, so that users don't
> >
> > > have to consult the documentation in order to create queries.
> > >
> > > You can try it out yourself by using the query "[[Category:Items]]",
> >
> > > and any combination of the printouts "?Was written by", "?Was
> > > published by", "?Was published on" (a date field) and "?Addresses
> > > topic". You can also use the query "[[Category:Cities]]" and the
> > > printout "?Has coordinates", to try out the map formats.
> > >
> > > The way it's implemented is that each format's "query printer" class
> >
> > > gets a new function, "getParameters()", that returns the set of
> > fields
> > > for that format, each one with additional information like its type
> >
> > > and its set of allowed values, if any. Here, for instance, is the
> > > getParameters() function defined for the SMWResultPrinter class, the
> >
> > > base class for all query printers:
> > >
> > > public function getParameters() {
> > >     return array(
> > >             array('name' => 'limit', 'type' => 'int', 'description' =>
> 'The
> > maximum number of results to return'),
> > >             array('name' => 'headers', 'type' => 'enumeration',
> 'description'
> > => 'Whether or not to display the headers/property names', 'values' =>
> > array('show', 'hide')),
> > >             array('name' => 'mainlabel', 'type' => 'string',
> 'description' =>
> > 'The label to give to the main page name'),
> > >             array('name' => 'link', 'type' => 'enumeration',
> 'description' =>
> > 'Whether or not to show values as links', 'values' => array('all',
> > 'subject', 'none')),
> > >     );
> > > }
> > >
> > >
> > > Although all these values are currently hardcoded, the plan is for
> > > each "description" value to be a translatable message; though the
> > > field names and values will remain in English.
> > >
> > > Two other, related changes are that the URL query string structure
> > for
> > > Special:Ask changed somewhat; and adding and removing "sort" fields
> > in
> > > the form is now done strictly via Javascript, which should make it
> > > faster and more seamless.
> > >
> > > Any comments or suggestions are welcome, about the appearance or
> > > anything else. There's already been a suggestion to make the "other
> >
> > > options" section hidden by default, to make the form look less
> > > intimidating; there's certainly a case that could be made either way
> >
> > > on that issue.
> > >
> > > Thanks,
> > > Yaron
> > >
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